[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] The FBI has unveiled a 22,000-square-foot mock city called the Kinetic Cyber Range at its Huntsville, Alabama campus to simulate cyber attacks and train for investigations, TechCrunch reported on June 13 local time.
The Kinetic Cyber Range opened in February 2025 and is a life-size virtual city equipped with homes, a hotel, a gas station, a grocery store, a courthouse, a hospital and a power company, the report said. It also has roads and traffic lights to replicate a U.S. community.
More than 1,400 people, including FBI agents and partners from federal and local agencies, have trained there since it opened.
Every area in the facility is connected to devices and systems that operate like those in real environments, and it is designed to prevent simulated attacks from spilling outside the facility. It also includes a data centre with more than 200 Windows and Linux servers, recreating the corporate environments investigators face when responding to real breaches or executing search warrants.
The FBI built the facility in view of a sharp rise in cybercrime losses. The U.S. cybercrime losses hit a record $20.9 billion, up 26 percent from a year earlier, the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, which tallied more than 1 million reports, showed. Ransomware was cited as the biggest threat to critical infrastructure.
The training site also recreates ransomware attacks and their ripple effects. Investigators can train on what decisions to make in situations that could lead to loss of life, such as hospital system outages. Digital forensics training is also provided. TechCrunch reported that it is controversial because it involves unlocking encrypted devices and extracting data using vulnerabilities not disclosed to manufacturers such as Apple and Google.
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